Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Last year I mentioned the legend whereby the Eskimos
supposedly have dozens of words for “snow”. Whether or not this is strictly
true, it illustrates the tendency of a language to develop in areas which are
important to the culture of its speakers. In this regard, one has to wonder if
any language has a more fully developed (or faster growing) vocabulary for
matters sexual than our own English language.

One of the newest entries to the extended sexual lexicon is
“twerking”, a dance move which rocketed to prominence with the wrecking-ball
video of Miley Cyrus. I’m not sure if the word is totally brand-new, but the
dance move surely goes back a good few years. Myself, I give Christina Aguilera
credit for permanently imprinting the “twerk” in my consciousness with her
2002video “Dirty”. If you’re a man, you
know what I’m talking about.

Of course there are any number of innovative words used to
describe women as sexual objects, from the derogatory skanks and cougars to the
self-consciously neutral posslq, but I
think my favorite has to be the milf.
I’ll never forget in Season 3 of “The Apprentice” when Donald Trump told TanaGoertz, a popular 40-ish contestant from the midwest, that people were saying
she was a milf. “Do you know what a milf is?” he asked her. “Yes”, she
answered, “it’s a mother I’d like to fool
around with.” Yes Tana, you certainly were, with your cornfed Iowa
wholesomeness. But I digress.

If sexuality is front and center in our North American
culture, then what more can we expect from the Yiddish language than the
paucity of expressions for such things? I’m not even totally sure how I would
say “girlfriend” in Yiddish…there is khaverte,
which in North America would surely be understood as girlfriend by analogy with
the English usage, but I don’t think that was the connotation in the old
country. (It should be admitted that Yiddish is not alone in having difficulty
here…even in English, it is not so easy to distinguish the case of a simple
female friend, never mind the awkwardness of an unmarried elderly gentleman
having to introduce his female companion as a “girlfriend”.)

At the other extreme of the relationship spectrum, we have
the prostitute. Yiddish eschews the German hure
in favor of either the Hebrew zoyne
or the Slavic kurve (Polish kurwa). I don’t have a very good feel
for the distinction in nuance between these, but I think it would have been
consistent with the natural ironic bent of the language to apply the Hebrew
term to the Gentile prostitute and vice versa.

And finally, in between the girlfriend and the prostitute, we
have the mistress. In Yiddish she is the kokhanka,
borrowed from the Polish. Once again, it is somewhat beyond my expertise to
determine if the meanings correspond with exactitude. Even in English, we have
to ask…just what is a mistress? A married man who keeps an apartment for a
lover on the side surely has a mistress. But what if he just sneaks around with
her on a regular basis? Is she his mistress or just his girlfriend? I’m not
sure. I’m not sure if a single man in
North America can be said to have a mistress (even whether or not he pays her)
but I think in the old country he could have had a kokhanka….probably because there’s nothing illicit nowadays in
sleeping with your unmarried girlfriend, as there would have been in der alter heim.

In Mein Zikhroynos, the
memoir of Yekhezkel Kotik, the author remembers from his childhood (around
1860) the jealousy of the poor Orthodox priest in his village, comparing his
lot with that of the local Catholic priest, whose lifestyle was lavishly
supported by the wealthy Polish squires. Hear what the Orthodox galakh though of his counterpart’s four
beautiful sisters, who lived together with him in luxury:

Thursday, July 10, 2014

A few weeks ago I wrote about the word öffentlechkeit, which I claimed was a mistranslation of the
American concept of “the public”. Yes, as an adjective öffentlech means “open” in the sense of “public”. And –keit changes an adjective to a noun.
But surely the noun which results from adding –keit to öffentlech
should have more to do with the attribute of something being in the public
domain than a literal translation of the phrase “the public” in the sense of
the man in the street.

I took up this discussion with a German Language forum on
the internet. True, the nuance in Yiddish will sometimes be different from the
equivalent in German, but it’s a good place to start. Except I got shot down in
flames. It turns out that in German, according to several very reliable
correspondents, die Öffentlichkeit is
exactly “the public” in the same sense weuse it in English. To be sure, there is are secondary meaning which
carry the connotation ofeither “the
public discourse” or the forum where that discourse takes place, but in common
usage it is simply “the public”.

I still think that regardless of the facts on the ground, I
should have won that argument. The English “public” comes from the Latin publicus, which was literally the public. The concept of the public as a body of citizenry distinct from the
rulership or the slave class was an novel idea of the Roman system, so it
is only fitting that the word has come down to us in that sense today. Its use
as an adjective is clearly derivative from the noun…something is “public
knowledge” because it is open to the public. Whereas in German you start with
the adjective/adverb “openly”, tack on an ending, and it becomes…the public? It doesn’t make sense.

Oddly enough, in German (and Yiddish) das publikum is a perfectly good word, but it’s used to describe
the audience, as in a theater performance or a lecture. (I don’t think it would
be used for a sporting event.) In that sense it’s very similar to Yiddish der oylam, except that the Yiddish word
also serves for the congregation in a synagogue, and I don’t think das Publikum would be used for
churchgoers.

We still have one more noteworthy expression for “the
public” in Yiddish: die gass,
literally “the street” from the German Gasse,
small lane. Oddly enough the German’s have Strassen
und Gassen, big and small streets, but in Yiddish we have only gassen: our highway is die chaussée. No, that’s not evidence
that Yiddish had its roots in Old France…like cauchemar (nightmare), trottoir
(sidewalk), and even crêpelach (!)
these French words came to us via upper-class Russian society. Not to be
outdone by the Germans, mind you, we can still rhyme “streets and roads”; but
instead of Strassen und Gassen, we
have weggen un steggen.

What is interesting about die gass is that there was really no such thing as “the public” in
the old country. There was literally no occasion when you would speak of “the
public” as comprising both Jews and Gentiles; you could talk about die Yiddische Gass or die Goysiche Gass, but never just die Gass. There was no Ivan Q. Public in
Minsk or Vilna; there were Jews and Christians, Catholics and pravoslavne (Russian Orthodox), serfs
and landholders, Poles and Ukrainians…but no coherent “public”. So the Western
European concept of die Öffentlichkeit
would have been pretty much a non-starter.